


Fracture Mechanics

by road_rhythm



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Blades, Crisis of Faith, Disjointed, Gen, Knifeplay, Loss of Faith, M/M, Vessels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-23
Updated: 2013-11-23
Packaged: 2018-01-02 11:19:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1056144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So it's three a.m. and he's staring up at the ceiling, listening to Sam knife-fighting Cas outside apparently just for fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fracture Mechanics

**Author's Note:**

> Gen if you want it to be; Sam/Cas if you prefer.
> 
> Yeah, I don't even know. Contains non-linear storytelling that may or may not work; concrit warmly welcome, even more so than usual. Faith issues and bad metaphors may cause seizures, paresthesia, and persistent sore throat in parrots.
> 
> Thanks to the incredible [Badbastion](http://archiveofourown.org/users/badbastion/pseuds/badbastion), there's [a podfic](http://badbastion.livejournal.com/23393.html)! I am tickled _in excelsis_. :D

So it's three a.m. and he's staring up at the ceiling, listening to Sam knife-fighting Cas outside apparently just for fun.

Dean passes a hand over his eyes. As the two figures outside the window move back and forth, the sliver of light admitted by the motel curtains winks out, comes back. Gravel scrapes against asphalt. Metal rasps over metal. Knives and angels, two things Sam has always liked. The parking lot's empty and they're in the middle of nowhere, so, Dean supposes, why the hell not.

Lucifer's intended and a fallen angel pick up knives and go at it by a Motel 6. Stop me if you've heard this one before.

There's a pause from outside, then voices, audible under the door's torn weather stripping. They aren't raised; they're nonantagonistic and conversational. Then the fighting starts up again.

Dean wonders whether Sam is using Castiel as a stand-in for Lucifer. He wonders whether this is training or something else. It bothers him not to be able to tell. He taught Sam hand-to-hand and knives both, has sparred with him all their lives until it became their own private language. He thought he knew all Sam's inflections in a fight. Listening to him spar with Castiel is a little bit like the day he found out Sam prayed.

He wonders if Sam still does. If so, Dean thinks he might have to punch him.

He punches the pillow, instead, and counts off the seconds in the dark.

: : :

Cas knows that Sam knows that Cas is pulling his punches. Sam doesn't even seem to mind that much. It's enough just to be in motion.

Angel blades are not sharp to the touch, but they cut anyway. Castiel reaches past Sam's defenses and pinks him lightly over his stomach. Sam turns, ducks, and comes up under Castiel's guard. He fastens one hand around Castiel's wrist and hauls him in, too close and too tight for attack.

Castiel allows the fingers to stay on him. "You aren't going to ask me to bless you, are you?"

Sam smiles grimly. It's what passes for a laugh, these days, for both of them. Castiel remembers clustering around with the others in the garrison to hear Uriel, remembers admiring his wit. Uriel, who is gone. That's how it is for celestials: six millennia of implacable order, followed by a split-second rush of change.

"I'm pretty sure I'm past that doing me any good," Sam says. "Pretty sure we both are. No, what I need— I need—"

Castiel watches Sam's face. Hand still on Castiel's wrist, Sam guides the knife in and scores it over his side. He makes a sound in the back of his throat.

He looks at Castiel. Castiel looks back and nods slightly. They count off paces and go again.

: : :

"Hi, Cas."

Sam rolls his head back against the wall while he examines the angel with avid interest. Dean gets the needle under Sam's skin, pinch-faced and flat. He withdraws it, decouples the tip from the syringe, and reaches through Castiel's midsection to dump it into a sharps container.

Today is a bad day. This soon after the demise of the wall, it's to be expected. It will pass. Castiel will save Sam yet. He'll do what Dean couldn't.

Sam has slipped his moorings in time. Castiel can tell with only a glance; the arrangement of atoms and chemicals in his brain has partially reverted to what it was some weeks ago, when the Winchesters called him down only to trap him in holy fire. (It does not burn him now.) He can see in the lattice of Dean's mind that Dean doesn't know that this is Sam's trouble; he only knows that Sam is troubled. It's quite cruel.

"I get it, you know," Sam says quietly. Dean stands with his torso through Castiel's arm, looking at Sam like he's afraid of what his brother will say next. He doesn't look at Castiel, since there's nothing there to see.

"Get what, Sam?"

"Why you made the deal with Crowley. I'd have done it. Still would. I'd have lied about it, too: I have. The problem with killing Lilith wasn't _that_ I killed her, or that I hooked up with a demon to do it, or that I betrayed my brother. It's straight-up that it just didn't work. That, and that I murdered an innocent woman. That's the thing I'm still doing penance for."

The substance Dean injected him with (7-chloro-1,3-dihydro-1-methyl-5-phenyl-1,4-benzodiazepin-2(3 _H_ )-one) is doing its work. Sam grins up at Castiel. "Doesn't matter how old you get. He'll treat you like a child forever if you don't walk away."

"Who will?"

Sam frowns. "God. Dean. Doesn't matter."

Castiel cups Sam's face in a hand that isn't there. He slips his fingers down, across Sam's cheek, over his neck, lower. "I am your God. And you are not my child."

: : :

He wakes up, and Cas is alive and Bobby is alive and it's like there is a God, after all. It's all so fresh and miraculous. _He_ is fresh and miraculous—finally, after all these years. Then, of course, he finds the crack in the foundation. He didn't know he could still be so disappointed. He feels pathetic and juvenile, like a kid whose big brother just told him Santa doesn't exist.

He goes around oddly raw and fragile—stiff, the way a limb is after an injury, except he doesn't remember _getting_ it. He doesn't remember a lot. There's so much he did, and Dean won't accept that any of it was Sam. Sam can't accept that any of it wasn't. He can't not be done with things possessing his body and mind. It's seriously getting old.

There must be frustration in there somewhere, buried or repressed or something, but he can't get at it. He bites his lip as he comes to the end of Bobby's shelf. Going by subject, he's got six volumes left over that don't fit anywhere else. Try another system. Alphabetical, maybe.

Wings brush up against the edges of his consciousness, but he still starts when Cas says, "Hello, Sam."

Sam swears and picks up the books he dropped. "Don't _do_ that!"

Castiel just watches him, serious as always. He looks from the books in Sam's hands to the dust-free shelf where the spines are all aligned within a couple millimeters of each other. "You feign order. It is a symptom of the chaos in your soul."

Sam grits his teeth. "Thanks. Real helpful, Cas."

Castiel takes a book from the shelf and examines it, frowning. Sam realizes suddenly that Cas shouldn't be here, not unless the world's ending, and he looks the trench coat up and down for blood. "What are you doing here? Are you all right?"

"I came to—see how you're doing."

Sam blinks. Castiel is supposed to be fighting a civil war. He shouldn't be here, making a house call on Sam. 

"I'm okay," Sam says slowly. "I'm, you know. Life goes on."

Castiel's—Jimmy's—lips turn down at the corners. "Yes, it does. There's that." He replaces the book on Bobby's shelf, which instantly reappears with its contents in the order Bobby originally put them in. Castiel's hand trembles faintly.

"You sure you're okay?" Sam asks, sure that he isn't.

Cas sighs. "It's not going well for me upstairs." He says it like it's something he's said before.

Sam knows the possibility behind Castiel's statement, but he can't really wrap his head around it. That after everything, a hand could simply reach out and right the hourglass again is more than whatever faith he had left could take. Dean has said, "Screw their pissing contest," more than once, because Dean is utterly tapped out, but he doesn't understand. He doesn't understand what's at stake. There's a lot Sam doesn't remember, but he remembers merging with Lucifer just fine. He knows that he could never resist a second time, not now that he knows what it's like.

"Anything we can do," he says quietly. It's about six in the morning and no one's awake to hear them. "If—if we can look for something, or—"

Cas shakes his head. "I need clarity," he says. "Once, I would have gone to receive Revelation. That's no longer an option." His eyes flicker up to Sam. "Do you have time for a fight?"

For the first time, Castiel lets Sam pink him with the angel blade. Again and again he lets him. Sam wonders whether the knife is real.

: : :

Sam extends his hand in breathless invitation. Something flashes in his eyes, and with a small, convulsive gesture he makes it a challenge. Not so overawed as he would like to believe himself, then. Castiel takes it.

"Sam Winchester, the boy with the demon blood." He wraps both his hands around Sam's—one is acknowledgment; two is comfort—and feels the boy's life flow warm under the skin. It is, strictly speaking, profane, and Castiel hears Uriel's incredulity that he is actually _touching_ this abomination, but he can't see the harm. Angels are not easily polluted. Only the weak need fear.

Castiel makes his handclasp an expression of his faith and love. He is angel enough to receive any of his Father's creatures. Sam, he is sure, has his purpose, too.

: : :

Sam is confirmed in the Catholic Church when he's a sophomore at Stanford. He stands in the nave with a batch of six other late bloomers in a cheap suit and tie while the beaming bishop tells them how they have received the Spirit of holy fear in God's presence, and how the sacrament left a permanent mark and they cannot receive another. "Remember, He has put His mark upon you, and wherever you go in life, He'll be able find you and give you strength." Then they join the line for the altar rail while the choir pipes up with William Blake.

_Little Lamb, who made thee?  
Dost thou know who made thee?_

At heart, Sam's really more of a Protestant, inasmuch as he likes his interactions with God unmediated and doesn't really think authority is a necessary part of the equation. His family makes their own holy water; it's not like he thinks any magic resides in the hierarchy. The faith he has, though, he cobbled together for himself out of the bits and pieces that surrounded him all his life. Catholicism is familiar. If he doesn't believe in the hierarchy, he does believe in the power of ritual.

Sam takes the little cross-stamped wafer and tries not to feel ridiculous. The ritual—like this, in front of a bunch of smiling people and not over grave dirt with something bearing down on him—feels like somebody's else's clothes, and the wafer tastes unremarkable.

_Little Lamb, who made thee?  
Dost thou know who made thee?_

_Little Lamb, I'll tell thee,  
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:_

: : :

Sam thinks it's a little weird that he's only in two pieces, but one piece starts before Hell and picks up right after it, unbroken. Shouldn't he not be able to remember anything before Hell if he can't remember that? How do you get it all bricked away if there's a pull cord left hanging out? Suppression is one thing, but a _wall_ is another. Not that he's an authority, or anything; it's just that if he'd ever thought about it, which previously he hadn't, he would have expected it to work differently—especially given that Death is, surely, the most linear dude in all creation. Perhaps it speaks to some quality of time he hasn't appreciated.

He reflects on this to keep himself from thinking about the way people keep carving him up.

: : :

A vacant commercial lot, this time.

Sam chokes his grip on the sword and throws it. It passes harmlessly through cloth. Even fallen, Castiel is at no risk from a man; Sam can fight as hard as he wants.

He wants to fight hard. They both do. Castiel drags the blade he's lent Sam across the asphalt with his foot and kicks it back. Sam retrieves it and immediately drops into a crouch again, circling.

They skirmish. "Don't you think that if He wanted to be found, He'd have shown up by now?" Sam says.

Castiel glares at him. "First Dean, and now you?"

"Have to be an idiot not to at least think it." Sam feints and Castiel pretends to fall for it. He's learning to couple deception with his speed.

"I thought you had faith."

"Oh, I believe. I just don't believe that He gives a crap."

"He put you on that plane and scrubbed the contamination that you _sought_ , eagerly, from your veins."

Sam barks a laugh. "Oh, yeah. Because I really believe in God's plan for me right now. 'Go forth and be Satan's cherry ride, my child!'"

Instantly Castiel is at his throat. He pushes Sam up against the fence with the tip of his blade at Sam's jugular. "You may enlist me in your insane plans. You may blaspheme all you like. But you may not trifle with my piety."

He presses the knife into Sam's neck just hard enough to prick and slowly pulls in the reins on his anger. Sam's pulse leaps and a physical reaction of fear races over his skin, but he holds Castiel's gaze. He clenches his jaw and just waits. Eventually Castiel takes the blade away. There's a term for it: trust games.

Castiel does not believe that his Father has abandoned them. He does not even question. His Father sees across the span of ages, and everything that has ever been or will ever be is His dominion. Castiel backs off to let Sam attack him again;

He says, "You are not taking Sam Winchester";

He grasps Dean Winchester with his true hands, pulls him from Alistair's grasp, sees him from the inside out and rebuilds him and brands his soul;

He hears Sam call for him and he opens his arms. It happens before he knows he's doing it (he has never done it before) and Sam turns away and his arms are empty;

He begs his brother not to make him slay him;

He harrows Hell and reaches the Cage and reaches in and pulls something out, but he can't see clearly, not Sam, never Sam, and he doesn't even know his error until he lands back under that streetlight with something he didn't mean to make; and

Sam comes at him with a knife.

: : :

Sam stopped praying four nights before he said yes to Ruby. Praying had become an exercise in anger, anyway: he tossed his fury as hard and as high into the sky as he could, and in a certain predictable amount of time, it simply fell back down to him, path unaltered. By the time Ruby showed up with a new meatsuit and a certificate of brain death like a car title, he'd stopped pitching.

It was a conscious and deliberate decision, not to pray anymore, but it wasn't until much later that he knew why it had to be that way. At the time, it was mainly a "screw you," just another finger to the God who took his brother and maybe another layer to the martyr's shroud he'd adopted ( _I will pull down Hell for you. Do you understand me? If no one else is going to get off their ass and do it, I will_ ). There was still an underlying reason. There was a reason why, when Dean came back and Sam still didn't _pray_ exactly but maybe he occasionally tossed a "hey, so, You know, if You or Your Hosts wanted to maybe not leave my brother utterly broken, that'd be great" out the car window into the wind, even that felt hollow.

Exorcisms are, technically, prayers. They call upon the power of God to cast out the unclean spirit within. The trouble with his psychic thing was that he cut God out as a middleman and liked it. It was hubris as _he_ understood it, hubris as he had defined it for himself.

A few times, he tried praying to Castiel. Exactly once did the angel show up. He was remote, unhelpful, but he didn't act like Sam was something escaped from under quarantine, and Sam was so pathetically grateful that he was immediately furious with Castiel for making him feel that way. He broke everything, back then.

Then he was scrubbed clean and plonked on a plane ( _Yo-Yo-Yosemite Sammmmmmmm_ ), which really felt very pointed. He could almost imagine the face connected to the hand that scooped them up in Ilchester: bored and faintly irritated. If faith had seemed hollow when it was practically compulsory, it seemed like mockery when he knew what Heaven really wanted with him.

Still, he did pray. Throwing himself into Ruby's training and renouncing any hope of salvation had been much easier; to get down on his knees and _repent_ after everything took sac. It was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. He stopped doing it, eventually. Dean was the only thing he still had faith in, and Dean was the only one whose forgiveness really mattered.

He prayed once more, silently, while Dean helped him run a rope up a pulley, haul a demon's ankles over their heads, open up her arteries, and bleed her into a funnel stuck in a gallon jug. She was their third customer of the day. The prayer was perfunctory.

Now he's back. He's been to Hell and now he's out. It's a miracle that seems less and less miraculous the more he pulls at the loose threads. He prays, and Castiel comes and opens his arms to Sam. Except it's not really Castiel, it's Cas; and it's not really praying, it's just a phone call.

He doesn't remember, but he knows anyway: in the end, in the Cage, he prayed again. He knows he didn't pray to God.

: : :

Castiel prays for guidance. Prayer is all that's left to him, since Revelation is gone and maybe always was a sham. It's a humblingly human exercise, but pointless. There's no answer.

Lingering uncertainty—not faith—bears him through the next weeks. If he's no longer certain God is with him, he isn't yet certain that He isn't. The moment that Castiel _knows_ that his Father has abandoned him is the moment that he presses his fingers to Sam's forehead and brings the wall inside crashing down.

There is no God. There can't be. If He were alive, Castiel knows, He would have stopped him.

He can't just leave the job vacant.

: : :

They tend to get drunk a lot to deal with the fact that the Apocalypse is nigh. The stuff that's in their budget burns intensely on the way down. Ellen and Jo burned. They sort of made themselves their own hunters' pyre, climbed on it, _and_ set it going by themselves, and Sam finds that a fitting degree of self-reliance. The only thing he and Dean and Bobby and Cas had left to burn was the photograph. Possibly the women would be just as glad not to have Sam handling their remains, considering that he's the one who got them killed.

He and Dean are lying on either bed in the motel room, watching nothing at all on TV and drinking. They aren't trading the bottle back and forth; there are two on the night stand between them. Even they don't actually drink that much, but Dean still got them separate bottles.

Sam takes a swig from his, rolls it around in his mouth, lets it numb up his gums, and swallows. Would transubstantiaton work on grain alcohol?

"You know why I joined the Catholic Church?" he says, staring up at the ceiling and forming his tongue around the words carefully. Dean grunts in reply, but Sam can tell he isn't sleepy. "I wanted to feel like I was a part of something larger."

Suddenly he cracks up. It's one of those where the laughter starts with a long snort through your nose and keeps rolling through your body like an earthquake. He laughs, and he can't stop laughing even when Dean gets up and comes over and shakes him, shakes him, shakes him.

: : :

He's knife-fighting an angel. He always has been, and he always will be.

*


End file.
